July 2005 Archives

According to an article by Judith Lamont, Law Firms Reinvent KM, KM is being integrated nicely in many law firms these days. Though the general KM hype has definitely died down, Dennis Kennedy is quoted as saying "Law firms have become more pragmatic in their use of knowledge management technology. They are less concerned about the buzzwords and more focused on what can be accomplished." So KM is now emphasizing practical, mangeable applications that can effect how lawyers work on a daily basis, sometimes globally, sometimes on a more local level.

Much of the emphasis seems to be shifting to identifying expertise rather than just delivering documents. At Heller, Ehrman, they're emphasized connecting people, though they're also working with American Legalnet to create a universal forms library, according to Robin Solomon, the firmwide knowledge manager.

The vast majority of premium research services are available via the web, and generally speaking, that's the way we want it. But there's just one little drawback. Web-based for-fee services often offer only one billing choice, a flat-rate subscription fee. Paying by the concurrent user, or simply paying for the time you use, seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. There are notable exceptions, of course, such as Lexis, Westlaw and Dialog. But for the most part, transaction based pricing is hard to find.

So now that we're paying a flat-rate for all this content, these same vendors don't seem inclined to provide detailed usage information. Perhaps they're just not properly motivated. I'm guessing they don't want us to know that the service that we paid $10,000 was used only 5 times. This lack of accountability has resulted in a whole new category of usage tracking products such as Missiontrek's Research Agent, OneLog, and offerings from both Lexis and Westlaw. But you have to ask, why should we have to buy and install software in order to get usage statistics that should be provided to us by the vendor?

At least one publisher has heard our pleas. CCH has just introduced account administrative tools for their online offerings, which include a usage reporting utility for generating usage reports based on user ID, practice area or client matter number. For a quick online demo, visit the CCH web site at: http://business.cch.com/irn/usageReports.htm

That's one down, and a whole bunch more to go.

Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren, a Wisconsin firm with 180 attorneys, installed West KM in June 2003 as part of a pilot program to evaluate it's usefulness for the firm. Carol Bannen, the firm's director of information resources, discusses their experience with West KM in the Law Technology News article, Evolving into Automation.

When trying to decide how to move forward with the firm's knowledge management system, they specifically looked for a solution that would help retrieve those documents that otherwise never would have made their way into their traditional work product library. "We realized we needed something to help us retrieve valuable work product - but it had to take much of the work out of the hands of the attorneys."

Carol says that their litigators were the biggest beneficiaries of the new system, and found the natural language searching to be particularly useful. The transactional attorneys at Reinhart were less inclined to use it, especially since they generally did not use Westlaw to the extent that the litigators did. This was prior to the release of West KM for transactions.

The bottom line according to Carol is "The ability to use Westlaw searching capability, to update any legal citations and to see easily when there is a Reinhart document citing a case has been invaluable to us and to our clients."

RSS has really taken off over the last couple of years. Yet there's still a relatively small percentage of people actually using RSS on a daily basis and few law firms have embraced RSS as a delivery mechanism for internal or external information. But that's going to change, probably sooner rather than later. All that's needed is an enterprise approach to RSS, putting the capability to read RSS files on every desktop in your organization.

I always thought that RSS would really take off once Microsoft incorporated an RSS reader into Outlook. There's no hint of that on the horizon, but Newsgator has filled the gap. Newsgator's RSS reader integrates with Outlook, putting RSS feeds right where they belong. Newsgator is now positioning their product in the enterprise market, according to a Red Herring article, RSS Goes Corporate.

Certainly the Newsgator strategy seems to make sense, though other players in the industry, namely, PubMed's CTO, Bob Wyman, writes in his blog, "I've regularly argued against PubSub investing too much in aggregator development since it is inevitable that Microsoft would eventually blow away whatever we created." It's hard to dispute that logic.

Pluck investor Allen Morgan also has an interesting point concerning enterprise newsreaders. According to the article, he states "It's a mistake to sell newsreaders straight to the enterprise at this point." He believes that grassroots adoption is the only way drive the corporate buying cycle. "When the CIO is the last person not to have it, the CIO decides to buy a license." There's definitely a certain logic to that point of view as well.

Reports that the upcoming version of Internet Explorer will include an RSS reader are encouraging though I can't help but think that integrating into Outlook, as Newsgator does, makes more sense.

At any rate, it's hard to know exactly when RSS will hit the corporate world big time. But once it does, we'd better be ready!

I've heard people extoll the benefits of using two monitors, a configuration that became easier to accomplish with XP. But I was slightly suspicious that this setup was desired more for the cool factor than for a real, practical computing advantage. And besides, I only HAD one monitor. I had no extras sitting around that I could experiment with, and until recently, I'd never seen such a setup in action. Then, a helpful tech guy at work set up my laptop LCD and my desktop monitor in a dual configuration. The first time I moved my mouse from one monitor to the other, I was hooked.

Here's how it works. One monitor is designated as the primary monitor; that's where your start menu and toolbar resides. You can drag open windows from one monitor to the other, secondary monitor, with your mouse. If you're working with two different applications, you can see them both at one time, one on one monitor and the other, well, on the other one. It's really quite simple.

Steve Bass explains the benefits quite nicely in his Tips & Tweaks article, Two Monitors Are Way Better Than One. The ability to see two full-size windows at a time is a big productivity boast. It reminded me of what I miss about working with paper, that is, the ability to spread out and easily look back and forth comparing and referring to several different items without having to obscure my view of any one of them. Cutting and pasting from one window to another becomes infinitely easier, and you don't lose your bearings in the window that is temporarily obscured like you can when using one monitor. When I'm only working in one application, I like keeping my calendar open on one screen at all times on the second monitor in hopes that I'll keep better track of my activities during the course of a day. There are obvious benefits for legal researchers, many of whom have bemoaned the inability to easily look at two full windows at once.

Then I had a vision. Why stop at just two monitors? Why not more? Desk space is limited, you might say. How many monitors can you realistically have? How about smaller monitors? If we really wanted to get retro, perhaps a small "rolodex" monitor for your contacts, another small monitor for you calendar, etc., etc. I think I can see back to the future! Maybe someday...

For information on how to configure multiple monitors, see How To Configure and Use Multiple Monitors in Windows XP from the Microsoft Knowledgebase.

What? You don't have enough room on your desk for two monitors? Try this product, two monitors, one stand. What fun.

Records management is a discipline that in the recent past might have been considered by some as, how shall I say it, less than scintillating. But especially in service industries such as law, safeguarding records is a mission critical task, a fact that became even more obvious with the destruction resulting from 9/11. Technology has also had tremendous effects on records management from RFID technology to electronic records management. Lee Nemchek discusses these issues and more in her article in Practice Innovations, Critical Issues in Legal Records Management. It's a very interesting view into what's become the new world of record management.

It's never a happy thing when you become dependent on a web service, such as Bloglines, and it goes down for maintenance just when you wanted to log on. But you've got to love a company that doesn't take themselves too seriously. Here's the message I saw when I tried to log into Bloglines this evening.

It looks like I'll just have to wait!

PDF files are considered to be fairly innocuous. They're used extensively in organizations big and small, and typically don't contain viruses or spyware. But with the recent introduction of Adobe Policy Server and a new product called Map-Bot, creators of content CAN monitor and/or control PDFs once they've been distributed.

Adobe's Policy Server "lets a PDF document's creator set policies determining who can view a document and whether the recipient can modify, copy, print, or forward the document." (InfoWorld, Adobe's Policy Server tightens document privacy, Jan. 5, 2005) According to Are Your PDFs Spying on You? (PC Magazine, June 28, 2005), Map-Bot "can force users to be connected to the Web in order to read the documents. It can track who's e-mailing PDFs to whom and what they're reading - in real time."

Publishers are likely to take to this technology for obvious reasons. On the bright side, they may be more willing to distribute their publications electronically via PDF if they know they can control or at least monitor, who sees it. That can mean faster delivery of a product that looks just like the print version.

And the current approach being used by some publishers such as "The Deal", leaves something to be desired. Subscribers to The Daily Deal Digital, a complete PDF of the Daily Deal, are now required to install a utility called the Unsealer, from Sealed Media, which tracks how many different computers are used to view that file. If a subscriber passes their copy along to 10 people, the The Deal will know about it.

Cisti's Document Delivery Service uses FileOpen Web Publisher to limit the number of times a document subject to copyright restrictions can be viewed and printed.

The problem is, how many utilities do YOU want to install on your computer. Especially in a networked environment, such programs can have unintended consequences, or you may not be allowed to install them at all.

Since Map-Bot leaves no software behind it may provide a better approach for copy protection. But you should be aware that content providers may have more information about how you're using their content than you might have thought.

You may want to share this web page with your business development people. It provides a quick way to see how your organization's web site ranks in the major search engines for particular keywords. All you do is type in the keywords you're interested in, then the URL for the web site you want to see ranked, and there you go. So if your firm specializes in a particular area of law, type in keywords related to that area, and see where your firm's web site stands.
[Via LibrarianInBlack]

By the way, one of the big advantages of law firm blogs is that they increase search engine ranking in a significant way. A good blog is more likely to show up highly in search engine results than a typical, fairly static, web page, according to Dennis Kennedy.

"I was shocked by the impact a blog has on search engine placement. Not only does your ranking improve, but the speed your pages get added to a search engine like Google is astonishing."

A Continuing Discussion of Law Firm Marketing on the Internet: What are Blogs and Why is Everyone So Excited About Them?, LLRX.com, July 21, 2003.

LawLibTech has a new look, and a new home. I'm been thinking about making a move to a new web host for a while, and finally took the plunge this weekend.

Glitches after such a change are almost inevitable. Please let me know if you see something out of place, or find a page that doesn't seem to be working right.

And as usual, thanks for reading!

"Years" is an exageration, but not by much! Gmail has been in beta going on 15 months. I mentioned a while back that I was moving from Mailblocks to Gmail, and promised to let you know what I thought of it, so here goes.

Changing email programs isn't always easy. Because you use email day in and day out, a certain amount of muscle memory develops, and even if the new service/software is better, it takes some re-training. Switching to Gmail was a fairly easy change, as changes go, with a couple of things requiring some adjustment.

Rumors are flying about a Google plan to offer previews/snapshots of for-fee content in their search results. (See Gary Price's article News of a Google "Premium Content" Program Begins Surfacing.)

I love this idea. We all know that everything is NOT free on the web, and that sometimes you have to pay for quality content. Depending upon what you're looking for, you certainly might be willing to pay for it if you only knew it was out there. If you see it in Google search results, you can make the decision whether it's worth the money. [Via LibrarianInBlack]

Yahoo's take on this same idea, Yahoo's Search Subscriptions, is already available in beta. There are several major publications available, such as the Wall Street Journal (last 30 days), Consumer Reports, and Financial Times, among others. I'd like this idea a bit better if the premium content being provided was available on a pay per view basis, instead of requiring a monthly subscription. On the other hand, I have a monthly subscription for Consumer Reports, and searching it via Yahoo is handy. For Barbara Quint's take on Yahoo's Subscriptions, see her Newsbreak, "Fee" Web Content Accessed by Yahoo! Search Subscriptions. According to Barbara, Factiva and LexisNexis content will also be available within the next few weeks.

For detailed information on the content scheduled to be offered, see another Barbara Quint Newsbreak, Varying Content Commitments from Vendors for Yahoo! Search Subscriptions. Note that the Factiva content will be limited to articles aimed at the general consumer market, such as entertainment and sports.